Doing things that make you better off in the short-run but worse off in the end. After the bursting of the stock market bubble and the failure of Enron at the start of the 2000s, much like during the 1980s, accusations of short-termism were often made against the stock market-focused capitalism of the United States and the UK. During the bubble, it was claimed, investors had become too focused on short-term profits and changes in share prices, and failed to probe deeply enough into long-term performance. As a result, managers did things that made their profits look as good as possible in the short run, often to the detriment of their company's long-term health. Indeed, many firms engaged in misleading and even fraudulent accounting practices to inflate short-term profits. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the complaint took a slightly different form, and was arguably less convincing, namely that short-termism caused lower levels of investment by businesses than in countries where the stock market was less important, such as Germany and Japan.